reading

(Alternate title: “What To Do While You’re Waiting to Move to Pakistan”) There’s a new list making the rounds of Facebook this week. I know we’re all sick to death of these lists: the “25 semi-interesting things about me” list and the “20 questions about high school” list and the “5 movies I’d take to a desert island” list. And yet I keep reading them, and I keep making them. I am a sucker for these things. This new list is even more potentially unpleasant than the others because it is designed to make you feel inferior. It’s the “BBC Book List,” a list of 100 worthwhile books as determined by the BBC, which comes accompanied by the claim that the average person has only read six of them. At least, this is how the list has been introduced. I can’t find any evidence that the BBC actually had anything to do with this list and that some nerdy grad student didn’t just throw a list together and tack “BBC” on it to make it more credible. In fact, I think this is exactly what happened. This is not stemming the tide of enthusiasm for this exercise in the least, however. The purported BBC Book List is all the rage this week on literary websites and blogs dedicated to things like proper punctuation. Put aside for a second the fact that I am a visitor to punctuation blogs and let’s talk about the books. So, the average person has supposedly read six of out these 100 books. A snooty little prediction like that makes me want to prove the “BBC”/nerdy grad student wrong, so I […] Read More